I read today that a WW2 'exploding rat' is up for auction (The Times, 30/11/2017). With the stuffing taken out presumably.
It seems this was a cunning 1942 plan by British 'boffins' to undermine German armament production. Agents would smuggle explosive-stuffed rats into munitions factories and inconspicuously leave them by furnaces.
Sooner or later, the idea went, a worker would spot the dead Ratte and exclaim 'In den Ofen damit!'. Rat goes in oven, explodes, whole factory goes up. You get the idea.
But apparently early attempts were intercepted and the project was abandoned. The best-laid plans of rats and men...
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Nothing so ambitious.
It was part of the Special Operations Executive training of ways to sabotage industrial works. If you cannot find some way to get into a factory to bugger up the works, and gaining access to plant explosives or start a fire internally is too difficult, get yourself one dead rat or pigeon, replace its innards with explosives and chuck it on the coal-heap for the furnaces.
At some random point in the future the dead critter will likely be shovelled into the furnace along with the coal with the outcome the furnace will need to be replaced meaning the factory is partly out of production for a period.
It wasn't a co-ordinated strategy for blowing up armaments factories. It was a suggestion for a fall-back method of disrupting production in a fairly safe way.
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I took the above from what I read in autobiographies of people who had operated for SOE.
Going by this story from 1999 SOE themselves confirm what you have said: https://search-proquest-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/docview/188407138?rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo
Norton-Taylor, R. 1999, How exploding rats went down a bomb -- and helped British boffins win the second world war, London (UK).
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Good to see you are still around Simon!
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Yes I am, after a fashion. Close call with the OU and Cuba business, though. Glad I didn't have to quit in the end.
I'm spread very thinly, though. And just when I thought I'd managed to give up one voluntary post (which I've yet to manage to hand over) I go and discover the Scientists for Global Responsibility are only up the road, so I've gone and joined and offered my services to them as a volunteer. I don't know what I was thinking of. "Hi there, all you Drs and Professors and Fellows and Rt Hons and MBEs and Lords. I've got a couple of O Levels and I think you need my help." I haven't done anything so grossly over-confident since I was in my early 20s, back in the days when I knew everything. I'll no doubt end up on a committee, I usually do!
I suspect you would enjoy reading the 1944 American "Simple Sabotage Field Manual". Don't Google it, get it from the OU Library instead because their version is much easier to read. Downloading the rubbish copy from the CIA web site, having found it on Google, will only get you kidnapped by min in black in the night who'll no doubt extraordinarily rendition you anyway. It is the handbook given to people who will operate behind enemy lines in what to train the locals to do. It is shocking what the devious buggers came up with. Why this was made declassified I cannot imagine because if we had come across that when I was at school we'd have made use of it there! (It was that kind of school, full of kids too clever by half.) The last section is about what to do as an admin person to screw things up. When I read that I was horrified - the behaviours suggested to cause disruption and demoralisation among office staff are identical to many of the working practices I came across in local government and utilities.